Dick - the thing is you are riding a horse that has already been broken. It is easy to design airplanes that fly well when for the last 100 years folks have been designing airplanes and refining the configurations and airfoils. They have also put their results in print for all to see and benefit from. With our power availability it is possible to get away with a host of aero sins and in some cases developing wrong conclusions for why things happened leading to more wrong conclusions (not that you have done anything like that ;-)

However if you start out from scratch - two teams - one with aero resources, one without - and both design airplanes to do a specific job that is going to be made or broken depending on how well the airplane is designed --- I would put my money on the guys with aero resources.

To add to what Lou mentioned - With respect to Rn differences from wind tunnel to flight test there is a correction that can be made for Rn but we also found a correction that is dependent on the wind tunnel. Something that isn't necessarily determinable but a correction determined from previous experiences with similar airplane types in different tunnels and in flight tests. We had a Mcair Polysonic, a Cornell and a AEDC 16 foot transonic correction. It usually shows up in a drag increment to get more precision in estimates of range, etc.

It was interesting that in looking at the CL break point at high angle of attack the Hi Rn windtunnels gave a more flight test like break.

I recently saw a graph in one of the many modelling magazines that I take (so have totally forgotten which one it was) that plotted the log of the Rn verses a factor of the wing chord. It covered Rn from the size of a fruit fly wing and flight speed to the super monster people haulers. It was interesting that for the most part a straight line could be drawn through the whole data set.

When looking at small segments of the curve you could see smaller slopes in areas and in come cases exceptional airplanes would fall off the curve.

However it did indicate that everything that swims or flies in the air that we love is doing so in a fashion that is appropriate to the maximum efficiency at that Rn. Flat wings for flies, curved wings for birds, and the airfoils that we love and know for our airplanes and above. Keep in mind that a flat airfoil that we use for our little foamys is not in any way efficient, just practical for something that doesn't need a range greater than 100 ft and is nicely separated at 45-50 degrees.

Being a very practical engineer for almost 40 years I depended on a heck of a lot of test reports, experience and airplane specific testing to get answers. By now I have a lot of accumulated data and experience that makes me reasonably effective in the field, however, when it came time to develope a supercritical airfoil for a particular configuration it was nice to go to the computational tools to save cutting several dozens of wings for the wind tunnel.